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Addressing the Study of Economic Activities and Land Use by Peasant

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Addressing the Study of Economic Activities and Land Use by Peasant PEASANT DECISION-MAKING AND POLITICAL ECONOMY: ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS OF THE VARIATION IN RESOURCE ALLOCATION WITHIN A BRAZILIAN AGRO-EXTRACTIVE PEASANTRY I ROBERTO PORRO II Summary - Addressing the study of economic activities and land use by peasant societies, this paper analyzes how peasants adopt distinct survival strategies according to particular combinations of social and biophysical driving forces. Focusing on social situations of heavy state interference favoring pasture conversion and concentration of land ownership, this paper discuss the economic behavior of an agro- extractive peasantry in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. Theoretical frameworks of peasant economic, ecological, and political behavior (Chayanov, Deere, Kearney, Anderson) are applied to field observations in five communities in the“babassu zone”. The study investigates a positive association between the loss of this peasantry accessibility to land and natural resources, and their engagement in multiple strategies of survival. Facing a large range of pressures, peasants in the “babassu zone” were able to identify and engage in specific political ecologies, associating the participation in capitalist relations of production, the adoption of collective action, and the reinterpretation of their traditional agricultural system and the way they address natural resources. 1 - INTRODUCTION The survival and social reproduction of peasant societies has been a subject of growing scholarly debate. Socioeconomic transformations at regional and upper scales and the resulting alterations in the biophysical environment play a decisive role in both the strategies to be adopted by peasants, and in the outcomes resulting from those adaptative strategies. As a result of dynamic processes of adaptation and change, peasant societies will survive, or else be dispossessed and succumb. The ability and flexibility of peasants to survive and adapt to critical environments and socioeconomic constraints has exceeded the expectations of policy makers and scholars. The extent to which peasants are able to maintain their social reproduction has been increasingly a function of the adoption of a series of non-traditional economic activities. Facing a large range of pressures and threats, peasant societies in developing countries have demonstrated their ability to identify and engage in specific political ecologies represented by the combination of economic I - “Prepared for delivery at the 1997 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Continental Plaza Hotel, Guadalajara, Mexico, April 17-19, 1997" II - M.A. candidate at the Center for Latin American Studies — Tropical Concentration and Development Program, University of Florida, and Inter-American Foundation fellow. The author would like to thank the Inter-American Foundation and the Brazilian office of the World Wildlife Fund, which provided support for graduate studies and for the research presented in this paper. 1 alternatives, rules and relations regarding natural resources’ management, and political expressions. This flexibility aggregates and weights the engagement in activities characteristic of the capitalist economy, the adoption of alternative forms of collective action, and a new attitude regarding natural resources’ utilization. These adaptations, on the other hand, transform what could be named as peasant mode of production1 . Engaging in capitalist economic activities, does not simply replace functions traditionally adopted by peasants. Peasants societies can also be transformed as part of a broader process of change including different notions of entitlement2 , alterations in the availability of factors of production, and transformations in the resource bases’ accessibility and composition. Distinct outcomes will result from the ongoing socioeconomic processes affecting peasant societies. Factors such as duration of occupation, household division of labor, natural resources’ characteristics, and previous relations with state, market, and the broader society are only a few indicators of this variability. Whether peasants will be able to retain their basic characteristics, deal with transformations and reshape their living strategies, or otherwise be completely destituteed and disappear, is a function of the interaction among these factors. The objective of this paper is to associate peasant economic behavior with the constraints and scenarios imposed by external processes, and with the transformations in the landscape and in the role played by natural resources. The study focuses on the case of peasant societies in areas of relatively recent but consolidated occupation, characterized by slash-and-burn, shifting cultivation, in the initial stages of shortening fallow periods and agricultural intensification3 . It addresses contemporary peasant societies’ survival strategies in the context of heavy interference from external factors, mainly state policies promoting concentration of land ownership. In addition, it analyzes peasant responses to socioeconomic transformations, and their effects and interactions with the environment and natural resources. Changes in land and resource use associated with the adoption of alternative economic activities are viewed as expressions of these responses. Peasants in the consolidated frontiers are in a process of dynamic interaction with their surrounding social and biophysical environment. They are not free riders in the process of environmental change and socioeconomic transformations brought by the implementation of development policies and programs. Instead, their constant situation of threatened survival determines searches for alternative economic strategies that, having as primary goal the provision of the household, ought to address and access their resource bases in a flexible way. The engagement in multiple strategies of survival then constitutes an adequate form to compensate the restriction or loss of accessibility to land and natural resources. Ruptures, fissions and transformations are unavoidable in this process, and are manifested in lesser or greater extent according to the resilience of each ecological site, and the resilience of the peasant society. Elements of peasant culture, identity, and economic basis will determine the extent and flexibility with which it will support changes. In the various stages of the consolidation of the frontier, increasing pressures over peasants, the removal of their means of production, and their adaptation to transformed realities, makes them consciously adopt differentiated strategies to survive. The adoption of distinct economic calculations, and distinct attitudes toward the larger society, towards the state and the market, towards their resource basis, and towards their own communities and households, is what maintains them as peasants in a transformed universe. 2 The empirical work compounding this study was based on social situations existing in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. A number of aspects enhance the significance of the study in Maranhão of external factors affecting the economy of peasant societies and their utilization of natural resources. Among them, the state’s transitional ecological features, the presence of one of the country’s largest peasant societies, and the heavy adoption of state incentives and subsidies promoting cattle ranching and concentration of land ownership since the 1970's. Social situations resulting from the evolution of the political economy affecting peasants in Maranhão differ among and within communities. The understanding of this variation is central for a correct assessment of socioeconomic and biophysical transformations at the local, regional, and national scales. In the case of the areas of occurrence of babassu palm forests in Maranhão, peasants’ strategies to counterbalance political economy threats are the association of their agro-extractive feature with the concept of environmental conservation, the balance of seemingly passive forms of resistence with eruptions of collective action expressed in land conflicts, and the adoption of new forms of social organization, such as local-level associations and cooperatives. Tenure security resulting from limited cases of government expropriation of large ranches caused socioeconomic improvements and initial stages of a process of agricultural intensification. In order to access such a diversity, this research will construct a typology of social situations exemplified by five peasant communities. Although the more significant occupation of the region dates from the 1950's, and acute peasant removal from their land began in the 1970's, it is possible to identify in a snap-shot taken in the present, the reproduction of significant generic social situations characterizing this process, given the necessary awareness to identify and isolate features not corresponding to each social situation’s predominant domain. Through the case study of five communities, I intend to demonstrate how the historical evolution of the political economy is perceived by peasant households and reflected in diverse resource allocation, through changes in their economic alternatives, and in new forms of social organization. The situations to be studied represent the processes of initial occupation (1), the destitution of peasants from most of their resource basis (2), the undertaking of collective action to avoid complete extermination (3), and the process of tenure security recovery, either through strong connections with state agencies (4),
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